Gamer's University - Updated More than Never!http://www.gamersuniversity.com
Read, Learn, Teach, and Share anything about any form of Gaming. Reviews, Tournament Listings, Links, and other interesting rarities. Do you have something to share with the class? Let us know!Tue, 24 Feb 2015 16:54:18 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1[Geek Pr0n] Musical Floppy Driveshttp://www.gamersuniversity.com/geek-pr0n-musical-floppy-drives/
http://www.gamersuniversity.com/geek-pr0n-musical-floppy-drives/#commentsTue, 24 Feb 2015 16:54:18 +0000http://www.gamersuniversity.com/?p=2169I didn’t make this, but I sure was impressed. (Special place in my heart due to I.T. being my day job)

Enjoy

]]>http://www.gamersuniversity.com/geek-pr0n-musical-floppy-drives/feed/0[Recommendation] The Uncle Who Works for Nintendohttp://www.gamersuniversity.com/recommendation-the-uncle-who-works-for-nintendo/
http://www.gamersuniversity.com/recommendation-the-uncle-who-works-for-nintendo/#commentsTue, 17 Feb 2015 16:54:22 +0000http://www.gamersuniversity.com/?p=2160 Trying something different today, this might be old news for some of you but I’ve discovered that there are an awful lot of people who don’t know about this story/game/thing and I want to help fix that because I had a great time with it.

If you were in elementary or middle school during the late 80’s or the 90’s, chances are you knew one or more kids who were, simply put, bullshit artists and at one point or another one of these individuals attempted to convince everyone else on the playground that they had a relative of some kind that worked for Nintendo or Sega making them the authority on all things upcoming from that company, no matter how outlandish the claims.

It seems that the whole experience of knowing “that one kid” in one’s youth was prevalent enough for one, Michael Lutz, that he crafted the tale into something of a horror story. A really good one.

The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo is essentially a choose-your-own-adventure story/game. At its most basic level, it is nothing more than text and selection trees, but the use of sound and glitched text adds levels of immersion that I found completely captivating.

So, yes, this is something that most people might describe as a “creepypasta” or the next evolution of such, something that is usually associated with the deep, dark parts of the internet (like 4chan!) But I enjoyed it. Maybe it is because I also knew “that one kid” who tried to convince everyone at school that he had a test cartridge of the Zelda 3 prototype for the NES, or a copy of Doom 4 from Japan in 1993.

If you’re real quiet, you can even hear their voice as you read.

Creepy.

But seriously, this game is fun, it’s short but sweet. Give it a play (and then replay it for all the alternate endings) Go try it!

Way back in 1988, the game Wasteland was released. It was a bit before my time, and in my opinion it hasn’t aged well. But it turns out, that Interplay designed the first two Fallout games as “spiritual successors” to Wasteland when they were unable to acquire the rights to the Wasteland name from EA (Oh, those rascals. Always causing trouble.) I knew none of this until very recently, and certainly not before seeing a friend play this game and exclaiming “Whoa! Is that a new Fallout game??”

So what does that make Wasteland 2? I would describe it as Fallout 3, if hey hadn’t gone first-person and abandoned the roguelike single-character gameplay style. It’s not perfect, but I am loving it.

There is so much charm in this game that invokes classic gameplay with modern accoutrements. The game begins set in Arizona, where I have resided for my entire life in one region or another, and it didn’t take long to start finding actual Arizona landmarks that they have worked into the post-apocalyptic narrative. I personally loved that. But you also move into another region later on and I found that same attention to detail there. But that isn’t all, it’s just a great game. The story is solid, it’s incredibly captivating, I feel like I have plenty of meaningful choices to make and the replay value is extremely high.

The game isn’t perfect, it does have some bugs that can be noisome, but nothing too obtrusive. The map can behave oddly on occasion and I found myself confused a few times in new areas as I was obviously completing objectives out of order halfway through the zone when the designers probably should have set up more barriers and/or flags to prevent that from happening (NPCs talking about things that I didn’t know about yet but the game assumed my characters did…that kind of thing.)

So I can’t give this game a perfect score, but I can say that it has been on my top 3 to-play list for the past three months as I muscle through to whatever conclusion I have earned (and I hope there are several). I’m not finished yet, but I believe I am close. This game is especially notable because it is the kind of game (like Fallout 1&2) that I will return to every few years to slam out another playthrough in a way that I hadn’t before. This is not something I have yet felt compelled to do with Fallout 3 or New Vegas, despite that I feel those games are outstanding for different reasons.

Maybe it’s a sign of my age, or the games I grew up with that make this such a nostalgia trigger for me, but I don’t really care. If I am a little biased on this particular one, then I can’t help that. This is just an incredibly captivating game that is fun to play. There have been two patches that I know of that have fixed a lot of the problems though, so that is a plus. Hopefully more will come soon to tie up any loose glitches, but even so this game gets a solid recommendation from me.

]]>http://www.gamersuniversity.com/review-wasteland-2/feed/0Tales from the Hospitalhttp://www.gamersuniversity.com/tales-from-the-hospital/
http://www.gamersuniversity.com/tales-from-the-hospital/#commentsWed, 14 Jan 2015 15:56:52 +0000http://www.gamersuniversity.com/?p=2154Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and good health to all! I hope everyone got through the holidays alive.

I, however, wasn’t quite so lucky. I survived, sure, but I feel like only barely.

In mid-December I developed a nasty cough which was accompanied by rolling fevers for about a week. This was pretty unusual for me, I have come down with aliments like this before, pop some advil every 8 hours for two or three days and it goes away. Well, this didn’t. Went to the doc and was diagnosed with an upper respiratory infection (yaaay) got the proper meds and lots of them and went home.

Fast forward to a week later, Christmas Eve. I can barely breathe. I’m talking a couple notches on the dial away from complete respiratory arrest. My wife wisely drags me to the Emergency Room where after some very uncomfortable tests and treatments we discover that, no, what I actually have is pneumonia.

More meds, more lost time from work, and more silence here.

Well, I got better…then I got worse again! Last weekend I was diagnosed with bronchitis after a lovely three-day respite of feeling great, I’m sick as a dog yet again.

But, I had some time to play a really neat game I’m getting ready to review and post about (later today if all goes well), so look forward to that.

Thanks for reading!

]]>http://www.gamersuniversity.com/tales-from-the-hospital/feed/0Qetchup – The World’s Healthiest Card Gamehttp://www.gamersuniversity.com/qetchup-the-worlds-healthiest-card-game/
http://www.gamersuniversity.com/qetchup-the-worlds-healthiest-card-game/#commentsFri, 07 Nov 2014 16:39:43 +0000http://www.gamersuniversity.com/?p=2144Hello everyone! It’s been too long since my last post so I wanted to share with everyone what I’ve been up to most recently. In addition to my game design projects, I am currently working with Gamelyn Games on a new game that will feature Mecha combat. So stay tuned for that. But also (and the reason for today’s post) I have recently gotten involved with a separate firm who has been promoting their new card game, Qetchup.

Initially, the plan was to play the game and write an extensive review. For various reasons, we had some difficulty doing so and the end result was I was asked to be a part of the project as a consultant and help rewrite the rules and offer input to improve aesthetics and playability. So far, I like how everything it turning out.

Then this was dropped on me: Qetchup was just awarded the 2014 Game of the Year award by Creative Child magazine…and this was without the improvements that are coming in the revised edition I have helped them to create.

Release details on the new revised version are vague so far, but I was told to expect a holiday-season release if all goes well. I’ve recently finished the rules copy and we’re still going over visual improvement here and there but everything that has developed so far I am quite pleased with.

As for the game itself, it is very much a family/children’s/educational game. Very light on strategy and quick-playing. Your hardcore boardgamers probably won’t care much for it, but in a classroom setting it would be a grand slam. It is essentially a draw-one-play-one set-collection card game with various bumps and twists. Your goal is to complete a 5-card healthy “meal” and rid yourself of the rest of your hand. There are a few ways to do this, but there are also ways to disrupt other players’ progress.

I’m looking forward to seeing the final product and if you have young people in your life that you’d like to get involved in games, this is worth checking out when the new edition becomes available.

The fantastic music and boss design of Mega Man
The platforming challenge of Ninja Gaiden
The artifact collection and combat of Zelda 2
The overworld features and map encounters of Super Mario Bros. 3
And the treasure-seeking and pogo-jumping of Duck Tales

all inside of a single game that stays within the aesthetic design boundaries of classic NES gameplay (much like Mega Man 9 and 10 did).

Shovel Knight is retro done right. Too often do I see games that are labeled as “retro” that just get the whole idea upside down. A retro game isn’t using as few pixels as possible for your characters and doing as little as possible with comparatively unlimited technology. Good retro-style games create a brand new experience that evokes the sights, sounds, and feel of the classic games it is meant to imitate (or in this case, I think a much better word is “honor”)

There is nothing wrong with this game that I could find, just that I wanted more. The gameplay was absolutely outstanding, the controls were tight and I received no grief about using my usb controller (it just worked), it was challenging and frustrating but never unforgiving (no “lives” to worry about, you just lose some of your money, which you can recollect from where you died), and this game has charm dammit. Loads of it.

Shovel Knight is a nostalgia feast that won’t make you feel like you’d be better off just playing the old games you want to fondly remember. It’s the kind of game that makes you want five more sequels and a special release on an actual NES cartridge (likely impossible, but still.)

I have not been this impressed in a very long time, Shovel Knight gets top marks, go try it! (Oh, and it’s multi-platform too. So much love.)

I have been swamped with projects right now (none of which seem close to completion but I just have to keep moving forward) but I did want to announce that Magnum Opus has shipped! Thank you again for your support, everyone. If you missed out, copies can be ordered directly from Game Salute right here.

I will also be at GenCon 2014, no booth or anything but I will be around wearing my GUGames badge. Come say hi!

When I was very young, two of the earliest video game sequels I was ever exposed to were Super Mario Bros. 2 and Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link. Due to this, for a long while I thought that it was common practice, or even a rule, that game sequels had to be dramatically, if not fundamentally, different from the previous installment.

Sometimes, I will think about these things and ponder the implications. I’ve taken to casually referring to this as “Contemplating the Weird” things about gaming in general. I do this with board games and video games and all kinds of games. It’s something that my brain has begun to do rather involuntarily as my roots have spread as a designer.

So, now that the explanation is out of the way, let’s get back to the topic… what if this was, in fact, the de facto rule-of-thumb for videogame sequels? What would Super Mario Bros. 3 have been like? Sure it was a massive improvement on the formula from Super Mario Bros. with the overworld map and storable items but it was a logical progression of improvement. We all know the story by how of how Super Mario Bros. 2 wasn’t really Super Mario Bros. 2 etc. etc. So maybe Zelda 2 is a better example for this.

Zelda 2 is easily my favorite game of the Zelda franchise. I know painfully well that I am in the minority there, but it is what it is. I enjoy action RPGs and the only Zelda game I consider to be an “RPG” at all in the loosest sense is Zelda 2.

So what if Zelda 3 wasn’t a throwback to Zelda 1 and was rather a departure even further from it…it might have looked something like this:

For those who don’t know, this is not a screenshot from a real game. This is an image that circulated around as part of a Zelda 3 NES prototype urban legend/hoax. But look at it…it has combined elements from Zelda 1 and Zelda 2 but looks like it probably handles more like Star Tropics, doesn’t it?

What if this was real, and just how the creators of video games chose to design and there was no such thing as Madden after Madden after Madden that are practically the exact same game with cosmetic changes. Or [Insert series of Console FPS games] or [Insert series of JRPG games]…

…Or Super Mario Bros. or Zelda?

How much different would the world of Video Gaming be if what I believed was true as a child, actually was the case, and it was totally normal–by design–for game sequels to be this dramatically different from all games before it in the series. What if the next Final Fantasy game wasn’t a turn-based RPG but was an action-platform RPG instead?

I would play the hell out of that game.

I wasn’t really going anywhere with this. But I guess that’s why I decided to call this post “Contemplating the Weird” and hopefully it will stimulate your mind and help you go on to create more unique and exciting things as well.

]]>http://www.gamersuniversity.com/contemplating-the-weird-video-game-sequels/feed/0[Tech Review] Pebble Smart Watchhttp://www.gamersuniversity.com/tech-review-pebble-smart-watch/
http://www.gamersuniversity.com/tech-review-pebble-smart-watch/#commentsMon, 10 Mar 2014 18:31:29 +0000http://www.gamersuniversity.com/?p=2101 I’m going to try something a little different today. That’s right, a tech review! As a gamer, I do enjoy many different gadgets as well (don’t worry there’s a tie-in to gaming for this anyhow)

I got a Pebble Smart Watch last Christmas and I have been using it long enough to the point where I feel comfortable giving it a full honest review.

Let me start by saying that I tend to buy watches that last. My last two have been Casio Waveceptor watches, that are powered by a solar-receptor face and receive daily time corrections by satellite. These are great watches and they still work great to this day. But I’ve been wearing my Pebble every day since receiving it (unless I am going to go do yard work or something, then I will wear my elder of the two Casios that I have)

For those who don’t yet know, the Pebble Smart Watch is, well, a Smart Watch. In the same respect that one has a Smart Phone. It is Bluetooth connected to your android or iOS device and is capable of sending notifications that are displayed on it’s ePaper (think first-gen Kindle) screen. The screen allows it to be highly power efficient. I have never had the watch die on me, but I am told that it lasts a week, sometimes more, on a charge. And the charger is magnetic–no plugs, so it can remain water resistant. Very cool.

Every time I get a text, email, phonecall, or notification (that I tell the platform I want to see on my phone, e.g. facebook or twitter updates) the message will appear on my watch screen and it will vibrate briefly to let me know something appeared. I can use the buttons on the device to scroll up and down or dismiss it entirely. This is especially useful when driving, I can ostensibly glance at my wrist to see if something is potentially important rather than digging my phone out and devoting my attention to it which is much more dangerous. If it is a phonecall and I don’t want to deal with it right now, I can dismiss the call to voicemail straight from my watch.

I was a little disappointed that they released a model with a metal band after the holidays, I would have much rather had one like that than a resin band, but it isn’t so bad, really. At $150 for the base model ($250 for the “steel”) though it really isn’t a big detraction. When people ask about mine I find myself telling them pretty often that most people, myself included, have spent more on watches that do a whole lot less than this. It is pretty unobtrusive too, I don’t feel like I have a small TV on my wrist, it’s very compact.

There are more features I’d like to see and I can understand that this technology is still largely in its infancy, but on the whole, this is a really great product and I recommend it highly.

Oh, and the watchfaces. The glorious customizable watchfaces. The watch can store 8 “apps” which range from a screen that will tell you the time, date, and weather conditions all at once, or one that will roll RPG dice for you (see? I told you I would get back around to gaming on this!)

PROS:
– $150.00 Price Point for the base model
– Highly efficient ePaper screen, long battery life
– Magnetic charger
– Water Resistant
– Great variety of watchfaces and apps, tons of nerd-candy to be found– including games!
– Awesome solution for “screening” communications that come to you- at a glance
– Vibration-based notification function is always noticeable no matter what you are doing
– Intuitive interface, good integration with phone (Android is my platform, I’m sure it’s similar with iOS)
– Too dark to see? It’s backlit, just shake to make it glow.
– Bluetooth tethering is highly reliable, best experience I have ever had using the protocol

CONS:
– Vibration unit only. No speaker in the watch. (This is my number 1, biggest disappointment with this product)
– Not a touch-screen (not incredibly necessary, to be honest)
– Most communication is only one-way to the Watch, very little watch-to-phone functionality
– The Pebble Steel may be a little overpriced at $250. a $50 markup for the metal band seems more appropriate; but I haven’t handled one myself to say for sure if it is worth it.

MAYBE WITH THE NEXT MODEL?:- Give me a speaker so my watch can make this sound when I get a message (in addition to viberation)- Solar screen or kinetic charging would be nice- Headphone jack to play music over bluetooth? (might cause waterproofing issues, so I can understand either way)
– If color ePaper screens ever get fully developed, this is a perfect candidate. (In contrast to the Galaxy Gear, which to my knowledge is a color LCD screen and has poor battery life)

SHOULD I BUY IT?:If you have a smartphone, wear a watch every day, and tend to buy things that you want to last…then yeah, this is a pretty solid bet. If you tend to buy your watches off the bargain rack because you are paranoid about losing or damaging them, then maybe stay away because $150 is certainly a non-trivial expense. I buy my sunglasses at the dollar store because I have a 3-year-old at home…so I get it. But I stopped getting cheap watches about ten years ago and this is my third one since then, so this is a really good investment in my opinion. Awesome especially if your job requires a lot of communication via email or phonecalls. Makes things worlds easier to just look at your wrist; it’s a bigger benefit than it might sound like.

The problem is not with the Wii U as a platform. The problem Nintendo is having right now is the same top reason why I haven’t had any interest in getting a PS4 or Xboxone at all.: Software.

If these companies would make a stronger effort to have a non-trivial amount of quality titles available at launch (or heaven forbid, after an entire year) I think they just might see an increase in sales.

The trouble (in Nintendo’s case) isn’t with the hardware itself. They have a very unique opportunity with their platform and they just aren’t using it to its full potential. Once that happens, they will be fine. What concerns me is that they seem to be going back to the drawing board on it instead of just putting out games that people want. Nintendo isn’t experiencing any of the backlash from privacy problems, hardware failure, can-I-use-used-games-or-not snafus, et al. Their problem is the singular fact that their software library for a console more than a year old is simply embarrassing.

“4 players plus 1 with a touchscreen that has access to information the others don’t” is an amazing formula for success. (And that isn’t even touching in the idea of more than 1 tablet being used at a time, which I thought was a natural progression for them, expecting the tablets to be sold a la carte eventually.) People with very real talent have been throwing them ideas for free with regards to software that would bring them success, but seemingly aren’t listening.

The Wii U is not a failure, or a flop, its sales are poor because it currently lacks what people look for in a video game console: a healthy library of good games. Nintendo: Please, be honest about the problem, and let’s examine the cause: Is it licensing? Slow first-party development? Uncooperative third-party developers?

I honestly expected to see amazing things by now. A new Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles game maybe, Tactical shooters where the tablet-holder is a squad commander directing the other soldiers where to go and what to do based on the information only they have, Spaceship combat simulators with crews of 5 and the captain on the tablet with privileged information for his or her crew.

Honestly, middle-schoolers have more imagination. Hold a focus group, I guarantee there will be grand-slam pitches. The money is in the air guys, all you need to do is reach up and grab it. We still believe in you, don’t give up (and please don’t make people regret the investment they have already made in this hardware, that will probably cost you more customers in the long run.)